It is often forgotten, by the public, the Press and other mountaineers, that some members of R.A.F., teams may be complete novices. Naturally, if they have no experience, they are allocated positions and tasks on a rescue where they will come to no harm. But the officer and N.C.O - and the other more experienced members - cannot concentrate on rescuing a casualty and watch their novices at the same time. If it is surprising that there are not more mountaineering accidents, it is miraculous that more team members are not injured - even fatally, on rescues.

One wintry afternoon a party of four climbers left the summit of Snowdon to descend to Bwlch y Saethau (where Lees had cut so many steps for the Cranwell cadets the day the Washington crashed at Wrexham). One man slipped near the top and dropped his axe. A companion tried to stop him, slipped himself, came off but managed to get his pick into the snow. He stopped after falling one hundred feet. The other man disappeared into cloud in the cwm below.

The R.A.F. arrived and with some difficulty retrieved the body which had come to rest a thousand feet below the site of the slip, such are the accelerating properties of steep snow and ice. Snow conditions were very hard and they were still on a precipitous slope. During the evacuation a recently-joined member of the team slipped, lost his axe, and started sliding fast down the snow. Another member grabbed him and held on. They slid together for twenty feet before managing to stop. The others, carrying the stretcher, could only watch helplessly, convinced that they were witnessing the start of another fatal plunge.

Most mountaineers have encountered, at some time, considerable hostility to their sport or themselves; hostility which has at its root the fact that one man, through irresponsibility, can jeopardise the lives of many others. But mountain rescue has become such a specialised craft that only specialists are involved in the more dangerous aspects, such as guiding a stretcher or carrying a man down a cliff. Such a specialist climbs for fun as well. Even before the teams became skilled it was mainly mountaineers who went out on rescues, and still do, when needed. If their lives are risked, the fact is not acknowledged, because every man, when he starts to climb, automatically accepts this responsibility. He puts his services in pawn, and in return, if he is injured, he knows that every climber in the district will search for him and help to get him down. It is a reciprocal arrangement. An objector could not, should not, climb.

There are some who fail to recognise this obligation. A party of so-called climbers refused to form a stretcher party when approached by the warden of Idwal youth hostel. In the Alps a similar situation occurred when the injured survivor of an accident asked some climbers to go to the assistance of his injured companies, one of whom was dead.

These are exceptional cases, the product, one assumes, of a different spirit which is abroad in the hills today. One notices it even under normal circumstances. Perhaps it is to be expected that, when you have people literally queueing for climbs, intolerance, bad manners and carelessness will manifest themselves.

For years in Wales one took clients to the Idwal Slabs or the Milestone Buttress for their introduction to rock. Not now, not at weekends. We go to the unpopular cliffs, such as Lliwedd, and even there the rock coming down Avalanche Climb on a Sunday morning can make an ascent of the route as unjustifiable as it was when first recorded - and christened. Sending down rocks is not bad luck, but bad climbing. Sometimes it is even deliberate. There are people addicted to a sport they call 'trundling': rolling boulders down steep slopes. The larger the boulder, the greater the achievement. Strangely, the observers on Ben Nevis, when the Observatory was manned, trundled rocks down the north-east face, apparently in ignorance that it was climbed.

One excuse proffered by the inveterate trundler is that he always Continue to page 2